Today we're unveiling a new theme option for MetaFilter. Yes, it's a new design option for MetaFilter for the first time in over a decade, which we are dubbing the "Modern" theme. The new theme is strictly opt-in; no one is being forced to use it and the Classic and Plain-text themes remain as options, so your view of the site won't change unless you want it to. To try out the new theme, select it in your preferences. There is much to explain and show off in this new design and I'll do my best to describe all the thinking that went into the process below. [more inside]
posted by mathowie
on Sep 24, 2014 -
1281 comments

In some ways fanfare seems incredibly popular already: there is a constant stream of new posts, lots of TV shows covered, and a growing number of films old and new. On the other hand, discussion within each post tends to be pretty brief, with a fairly small number of comments and little back and forth dialog. I don’t know if my preferences reflect the majority but I’d love to have more meaty, deeper discussions about the movies I’m interested in. I wonder if some redesign away from the traditional mifi scrolling posts format would help make the discussions deeper and more ongoing. [more inside]
posted by latkes
on Sep 15, 2014 -
115 comments

I'm trying to find a post from wherein someone described a strategy of inserting deliberate and glaring errors into advertising copy (or possibly, web page design) so that the customer would find them, correct them and leave the bulk of the work untouched. [more inside]
posted by ninazer0
on Jan 15, 2014 -
17 comments

Mefite[1] Anil Dash[2] writes[3]:
"Simply learning from disciplines like urban planning, zoning regulations, crowd control, effective and humane policing, and the simple practices it takes to stage an effective public event, we can come up with a set of principles to prevent the overwhelming majority of the worst behaviors on the Internet." Examples? Why Metafilter, of course, (as well as Stack Exchange sites, of which he is a board member). [more inside]
posted by Tuesday After Lunch
on Dec 29, 2011 -
89 comments

As much as I love MetaFilter, I hate its color scheme / stylesheet! (Sorry!) I find it hard to read. I want to permanently disable the css so that every time I visit the site I only see the basic html. I am using Firefox. [more inside]
posted by betamercapto
on Apr 10, 2010 -
66 comments

Incredibly minor design detail: Could the [add to favorites] button be switched with [!], so that [add to favorites] is adjacent to 'x people marked this as a favorite'? I'm always hitting the flag button when I want to favorite something because it's right next to favorites. [more inside]
posted by oneirodynia
on Jan 7, 2009 -
43 comments

My little pony: how much work would be required to turn the "contains answers marked as best" checkmark on the front page of AskMe into a link to the first best answer?
posted by flabdablet
on Mar 27, 2008 -
18 comments

We've still got the CSS rounded tab corners in MetaTalk, so I assume they're not breaking anything - can we have them in the blue and green now? They're purty. Thanks. [more inside]
posted by nicwolff
on Nov 20, 2007 -
25 comments

Hey, I see there's suddenly a new font in use for song titles (and linking directly to threads!) at MeFi Music. Looks good to me: the page is more unified. Might I be so bold as to make a further suggestion? Make the song titles a little smaller. I don't think they need to be so big, really, and it'd make more space, so more MeFier's songs could bask a little longer in those bright MeFiMu front page stage lights. Whaddaya think?
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Aug 29, 2007 -
43 comments

I always click on "N favorites" rather than "+" to add a favorite, because I'm tripped up by the two links in one set of brackets. Would it be obscenely contentious to request that we alter this: [2 favorites +] [!] to this: [2 favorites] [+] [!] Thanks!
posted by DenOfSizer
on Jun 9, 2007 -
41 comments

Without complaining about a specific thread, Matt, can we get "flagging" to be inline/ajaxy, as a drop down, rather than the press, choose, new page, back to thread? The way that the favorites work?
posted by filmgeek
on May 17, 2007 -
45 comments

This has occasionally been mentioned before, but are the tabs on the front page currently serving any purpose? The functionality of 'Recent Posts' seems duplicated by the home page, 'My Favorites' by 'Favorites', 'Popular Favorites' by 'Popular', 'My Comments' by, well, 'My Comments'. 'Recent Comments' I simply don't find useful, but that may just be me.
posted by spiderwire
on Mar 22, 2007 -
21 comments

Ponytime: I have a lot of favorited posts. If I want to find something from two years ago, I have to scroll through the whole list. Could the pages be numbered so I could go directly to Page 1? I apologise if this has been asked before, I didn't find any requests through the search engine.
posted by maryh
on Dec 16, 2006 -
10 comments

I was having trouble figuring out how long I needed to wait before I posted again. I eventually found it in the FAQ, and that's all well and good, but I found the FAQ itself difficult to find. Sure, it's linked at the bottom of the various MeFi sites, but only on MeTa is it linked at the top. That's an issue for people like myself that mostly read MeFi through the RSS feed and don't normally scroll through the site to the bottom. Heck, I didn't even know the footer existed prior to today! So my request is to link to the FAQ from the header on the sites that don't currently have it there.
posted by taumeson
on Sep 11, 2006 -
12 comments

Default colours in Projects. The default purple denoting a used link in Projects is near impossible to read against the background colour. Any chance of a change?
posted by biffa
on Jun 20, 2006 -
10 comments

What if the most recent posts on AskMe were displayed on the front page according to how many answers they had already received in ascending order, i.e. with those having the fewest answers remaining near the top for longer than they currently do?
posted by xanthippe
on Jun 15, 2006 -
13 comments

Love/Hate: I can't read AskMeFi (CSS help?). Does anyone have an external CSS file or a setting or a magic pixie dust that makes these pages we're on more readable?

I tried posting this question to askmefi, but got prompted with a "prob better on metatalk" denial. There is no Category for help, so I'm putting this under feature requests...

I'm using firefox (which offers more solutions) to read these pages and I find the colors, indentation, lack of structure so hard to follow. I would love something that had alternating row (posts) colors and a way to really tell the difference between a post, a comment, a response, whatever.

Any usability specialists out there with the same beef? I love the content, its just the presentation that drives me batty. (I do use RSS to choose what to read, but once I click in...boomsucka...I feel like I'm in a all green library with green books green carpeting a couple yellow magazines and no cataloging of any sort.

I don't know if it is the kerning or the tracking but the letterspacing on the small font in the logo really sucks (not so noticable on MetaTalk, but check out "querying the hive mind" on AskMe and "community weblog" on MeFi). Don't make me call the typography police.
posted by spock
on Jan 24, 2006 -
14 comments

In AskMetafilter, if the tags box extends into a highlighted "best answer" box, the two collide instead of readjusting for each other. This includes a text wrap-around. I demand perfection down to the pixel.
posted by geoff.
on Jan 6, 2006 -
3 comments

Ok don't know if this is permissable...I'd like to AskMeFi about my own site, but not as self-promotion. I'd like build a shortlist of why it sucks and what I can do about it. Ok to do so?
posted by Kickstart70
on Dec 22, 2005 -
13 comments

baby steps. I'm going to be redesigning things over a long period, one small chunk at a time. Up for feedback today: a new header for the sites. The goals were to make it shorter vertically, group items by activity, and to clean up things here and there. Please read along and leave some feedback [more inside]
posted by mathowie
on Nov 17, 2005 -
213 comments

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About MetaTalk

MetaTalk is the first spin-off subsite of MetaFilter and is designed as a space to talk about MetaFilter itself. MetaTalk is the place to discuss features, bugs, and issues of policy with the rest of the membership.